LG is showcasing their new Super LED computer monitors, showing off the thin form factor of their E2391VR, showing the IPS v6 wide viewing angles, the extra good color reproduction, the upscaling processor that is built-in and the new lower power consumption of their new LED.
Acer confirms at IFA: No ARM Laptops before Windows 8
I got it confirmed by a high-ranked product strategy manager (on Ultrabooks) at Acer that Acer will likely not release an ARM Powered Laptop before Windows 8 is ready. That probably means, he says, not before the beginning of next year. He says though that he does not know about Acer making ARM Chromebooks or not. I have to emphasise that this guy is in charge of the strategies around Acer’s new Ultrabook, so he might not know everything that is being worked on in his 7757-employee, $20-Billion-revenues-per-year company.
Sorry about my article posted on July 23rd, quoting yet another turns-out-to-be-a-false-rumor Digitimes article where the Acer CEO was reportedly saying that Acer’s ARM laptop was imminent.
Another perhaps interesting aspect of Acer’s business to consider is that while Acer complains of lowering profit margins and lowering consumer spending on Intel Powered Laptops and Desktops (in exchange for more spending on ARM Powered Smartphones and Tablets), companies like Lenovo and Dell seem to be suggesting in other speeches that they are doing ok. I do not know if Lenovo’s numbers about them being the fastest growing PC maker has something to do with them having recently acquired NEC and Medion, it surely is interesting to follow the profit margin and growth-disruption that ARM devices are doing to the PC business.
The imminent $199 ARM Powered Chromebook is the single most disruptive threat to Intel, Microsoft, Apple and the PC/Mac profit margins business.
My take on Samsung at IFA, awesome but perhaps misplaced
Probably the highlight of this IFA show for me has thus far been the unveiling of the awesome Samsung Galaxy Note (2), Samsung Galaxy S2 LTE and Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 for reasons of the pure awesomeness to see the new high resolution Super AMOLED screens in action (4.5″, 5.3″ and 7.7″) and to get a feeling of the upcoming probable Nexus Prime hardware experience.
There is some talk on blogs about Samsung removing the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 from the showfloor today on http://www.techmeme.com/110903/p15#a110903p15 and this has now become the conspiracy theory here in Berlin around the IFA show.
I do not believe for one second that Apple has any authority over Samsung at IFA, regardless of the bogus lawsuits going on in bogus court rooms in Dusseldorf, Netherlands and Australia. Samsung is paying the IFA consumer electronics show millions of euros for their hall, over many years, Apple never spent one single cent at IFA or at any other trade shows worldwide for that matter. Apple thinks they are too cool to compete in trade shows, Apple does not want people to think of them as a mere competitor in a market.
Here’s what I think Samsung might be thinking right now, and what I have been saying from the first second I saw their latest devices:
1. Samsung is now the worlds leading Smart Phone manufacturer, in front of Apple.
2. Just like Apple, Samsung makes much higher profit margins on the smartphones than on the tablets.
3. Even with the new Super AMOLED factory now in function in South Korea, Samsung can simply not output enough Super AMOLED screens of all the different sizes and types before this Christmas sales.
4. The 7.7″ Super AMOLED screen is awesome and all, but Samsung cannot justify the extra cost of manufacturing 7.7″ Super AMOLED vs continuing to use LCD on Tablet sizes.
5. Samsung needs to make about 50 million Smartphone sized Super AMOLED Plus screens during these next few months, there is no space in their factory to also make 7.7″ such screens, and it basically costs 3x to 4x more to make a 7.7″ Super AMOLED screen compared to a 4.5″ size, cause you can fit upwards 3x to 4x more smartphone sized screens on their manufacturing process.
6. Super AMOLED screens are beautiful to look at, bravo. But the LCD manufacturing process is operating at about 40x larger scale worldwide. Also, advances in LCD screens cannot really justify the cost difference in manufacturing those expensive Super AMOLED screens.
7. The reason Samsung can make Super AMOLED screens today even though I would guess the Super AMOLED Plus screen costs 2x more than the highest-end LCD, is that Samsung is still making $250 profit or more per smartphone when they sell them upwards $500 through carriers and unlocked.
8. My main complaint on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 form factor is that it is too wide to fit normal jacket pockets, I cannot fit it inside of my jacket pocket. That means that it makes it much less likely people will carry it around everywhere, but that it would have to mostly stay at home. While being shown at IFA, the device did have a sticker saying something like “this may not be the final design”, maybe Samsung has figured out from mine and others comments at the show, that if they really want to release a 7.7″ tablet, they may have to consider trying to cut more of the bezel off of the device.
Here are some pictures comparing the my Archos 70 Internet Tablet that I have used every day for the past 11 months because I can carry it everywhere in my jacket pocket vs the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7″ shown at IFA that simply does not fit in jacket pockets so has to stay at home:
While the Samsung Galaxy Note also is fantasticly awesome, my suggestion to technology fans is not to expect that Samsung can manufacture enough of those 5.3″ HD Super AMOLED screens before the end of this year. Also, Samsung may be realizing that it may be very hard to sell the feature of using a stylus on top of a capacitive screen, it may be too hard for them to lower the lag time and increase the accuracy enough to make it usable. In which situations does mass market consumers really want to use a stylus often? I can think of situations such as collaborating in real-time on annotating text, but I don’t think a light emitting Super AMOLED screen is the right type of screen for that usage.
So where does Samsung go from here? My guess is that they will focus as much of the Super AMOLED factory as they can on making 4.3″ and 4.5″ screens for the upcoming Nexus Prime = Samsung Galaxy S2 = Samsung Galaxy S2 LTE = Verizon Droid Prime, etc. This is where they are getting the most profit. And while the Samsung Galaxy Note might come out, and can definitely sell plenty more than Dell Stream 5 did a year ago, I think Samsung is probably going to use LCD for the Tablets that they’ll release before the end of this year. My guess is Samsung may release updates for their 7″ and 10.1″ tablets before the end of this year, and those will likely use LCD and not Super AMOLED.
In the medium term, I guess that AMOLED may be phased out again, but it already cannot be considered a failure in any way, it has provided Samsung with a unique differentiator in their market share gaining activities in the most important smartphone market. By the time AMOLED factories may be closed in 2-3 years, the quality of LCD at that time will have increased so much, with technologies such as Pixel Qi, IPS and FFS, that it will not make sense to make any AMOLED anymore. Most importantly, the profit margins on smartphones will quickly be reduced as the smartphone becomes a commodity, the profit margins will not anymore allow for the price difference that there is between LCD and AMOLED.
RFTech $89 Telechips capacitive Android Tablet
RFTech presents $89 Telechips ARM11 tablet and the $111 Telechips ARM Cortex-A8 tablet. You can find more information at http://rftech.com.cn
Yifang Smart Pen for iPad
You clip a thing on the iPad connector and with that special Pen from Yifang, you can scrible and write text memos in the special iPad app that they provide.
PocketBook A10 Android Tablet
PocketBook launches their new PocketBook A10 Android Tablet. It has a 10.1″ capacitive touch screen and uses the Texas Instruments OMAP3621 1Ghz ARM Cortex-A8 processor with 512MB RAM.
PocketBook at IFA 2011 Press Conference
This is the full PocketBook press conference (partly in English and partly in German) at IFA 2011, where they launch the new PocketBook A10 Android Tablet.
Sony PRS-T1 Reader Wi-Fi, 6″ e-reader with infrared multi-touch
Sony is launching their new generation of Eink e-readers with this Sony Reader Wi-Fi, it supports dual touch using infrared technology. The Wi-Fi can be used for stuff like web browsing, Google searching, Wikipedia searching for words highlighted in any book and for downloading e-books from the web or even viewing e-books within the web browser.
Sony Tablet S and Sony Tablet P at IFA 2011
Sony is bringing some interesting design concepts to the Tablet market, with the Sony Tablet S that has a bump on the back to be more holdable with one hand, the Sony Tablet P that has a dual 5.5″ screen, prices start at 479€ and go up to 599€ for these tablets that use Tegra2 at 1Ghz, they have no HDMI output or USB host.
Latest news from E Ink at IFA 2011
Sriram Peruvemba, Vice President of marketing at E Ink, gives us the latest news from E Ink, they announced that they will ship between 25 million and 30 million E Ink screens this year, just for the E Ink e-readers like the Kindle 4 and Nook Touch. Yup you read right, 30 million of those devices to be sold this year.
Samsung Galaxy Note, testing out the HD Super AMOLED screen
This screen really is amazingly awesome. 5.3″ HD Super AMOLED, 1280×800, amazing and awesome colors, in a huge form factor that still can fit in any pocket.
Here are some comparative pictures showing it next to the Archos 70 Internet Tablet, the Archos 43 Internet Tablet and the Samsung Galaxy S2. You can click on the images to see the full size.
Sharp 8K4K TV, 7680×4320 resolution, 85″, the future of HDTV
Sharp is demonstrating the most insane HDTV ever, at 8K4K, they recorded a bunch of demonstration videos, the quality is amazing. Here’s a video interview with a product manager. They say that the sources for 8K4K content are missing, but we can all at least upscale our 20 Megapixel consumer photo camera pictures on there, and I think they should just tell Hollywood to transfer the 8K4K versions of all movies onto cheap soon to cost $50 2TB hard drives.
Samsung Galaxy S2 LTE, 4.5″ Super AMOLED Plus, 1.5Ghz Dual-core
This looks like an upgrade of the already most awesome phone in the world, they increased the screen size from 4.3″ to 4.5″ and they increased the processor speed to 1.5Ghz Dual-core. I am just speculating here, but this processor might be the Texas Instruments OMAP4460 at 1.5Ghz, or perhaps it is a new version of the Samsung Exynos clocked at a higher clock speed. Perhaps this processor does improve video playback and 3D performance. If you have any information about the processor used in this device, please post in the comments. This might be pretty close to the hardware that may be used for the Nexus Prime, Ice Cream Sandwich reference development platform.
Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 3.6
This is the new 3.65″ HVGA capacitive, Android WiFi tablet PMP device, running on a Texas Instruments OMAP3630 processor. The target price is 179€.
Samsung SSD 830 Series, new faster 6Gbit/s SATA transfer speed
Transfer bitrates are now going upwards 520MB/s read speed and 400MB/s write speed. They plan to release those around October, in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities, going upwards 800€ for the 512GB SSD storage.
Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook, starts at 799€ up to 1199€
Acer is also launching one of those new thin Intel Core i powered Ultrabooks, expensive, but thin but they promise power. I haven’t yet seen one with 2 USB3 ports, I wonder why they don’t design them with that. The price starts at 799€ and goes up to 1199€ depending on configuration, using any among Intel Core i3, i5, i7, SSD or Hard Drive and the amount of RAM.
E Ink in Credit Cards
You push a button behind the credit card, it displays a unique security code which can be used as pin code for payment security. The battery in that credit card lasts for up to 2 years, it’s the same size and weight as a normal credit card and it is unbreakable.
Pogoplug Mobile, cheap new simpler Pogoplug
This new Pogoplug Mobile is designed to be cheaper, with just 1 USB host connector, 1 SD card slot, one Ethernet port and the power charger. The idea is that you connect this at your house, with a 2TB external hard drive or whatever other storage you want, and you can then stream it to your smartphone, tablet, laptop wherever else you are in the world. There is also a hacking community at http://pogoplugged.com that may do things like BitTorrent RSS downloads work on this device. This device may still have about the same performance using the same Marvell processor as the previous Pogoplug, but that is to be confirmed. Please post in the comments if you know anything more about the actual performance of this processor to download from BitTorrent RSS, stream HD video files over the local network and other of the processor intensive tasks that can be envisionned from such Internet connected NAS system.
MHL now shipping on the Toshiba WL800A HDTV
This means that with one cable, no adapters needed, people can charge and output HDMI using any MHL compatible device on this new Toshiba HDTV. MHL now has 60 licensees, possibly everyone in the industry is going to be using this solution to combine all of charging, HDMI output, USB slave and perhaps more all into one Micro-USB connector.
ViewSonic ViewPad 7x, Honeycomb 3.2 7″ Capacitive Tegra2 tablet
They have now got Honeycomb 3.2 working on this, 7″ capacitive 1024×600 tablet, to be released for around 349€.